Today, feeling insignificant is largely a consequence of an unhealthy gigantism of scale that pervades contemporary life, dwarfing all of us except a miniscule few in positions of enormous prominence.  There are actions we could collectively take to mitigate and even reverse this condition, but these are unlikely to occur unless large numbers of people first recognize the problem and its effects. 

A good place to start is with a question that might arise in a lot of people’s minds:

If a feeling of insignificance is all that widespread, how come we don’t hear much about it?  Shouldn’t it be a yakked about day and night, on all the talk shows and blogs and podcasts and whatever?

Well, maybe it’s like sharing a concern that your penis might be too small.  How many guys have you ever heard discuss that topic?  Who would want to call attention to themselves in that way?   Might other people consider it contagious? What if talking about it ended up just making you feel worse about yourself?

Instead of looking for people to openly lament how insignificant they feel, a more useful gauge is to see how strenuously they proclaim they’re not.  Participating in tribal warfare is one classic way of reacting to feelings of personal smallness (more on that to come shortly), so it’s a very useful barometer. And it doesn’t take exceptional insight to see a lot of other behaviors that are increasingly common these days as markers for feeling inconsequential.

The goal of this essay is to open more eyes to the problem—and then move on to ways to deal with it. I’ll suggest some potential remedies, but I’ll tell you right at the start that my list won’t be complete or definitive.  It’s going to take a lot of good minds to figure out how to deal effectively with something so vast that it makes all of us feel small.  Maybe your mind will be among them.

For now, though, the most useful thing we can do is take a closer look at the root of the problem: